People Will Talk

Today’s the day to high-foot it to Brooklyn for the screenings, at BAM, of Joseph Mankiewicz’s comedy of motherhood and metaphysics, “People Will Talk” (which, if absolutely necessary, you can also get on DVD). It’s a film of manifold virtues, a manifestation of genius—after winning back-to-back Oscars with “A Letter to Three Wives” and “All About Eve,” Mankiewicz cut loose on a subject dear to his heart, medicine (he had been a pre-med student at Columbia) and, more crucially, the connection of body to mind. Like so many who abandon a field, Mankiewicz seems to have thought he knew better than the pros, and his view of medicine here, extraordinarily idealized, plays both like a tribute to the science as the kind of art form he imagined it could be and a reproach to its customary practitioners. It’s also a tribute to a higher notion of culture, an uninhibited one that admits the bodily drives without shame or reproach. (The story, daringly, concerns a woman who is pregnant out of wedlock and the doctor who treats her.)

High culture takes its place through classical music—the film’s main character, played by Cary Grant, is a med-school professor who also conducts the student orchestra, and the repeated iterations of Brahms’s “Academic Festival Overture” make it a memorable emblem of Mankiewicz’s blithe profundity. (It’s the only Hollywood movie I know where the name of Serge Koussevitzky, the great conductor, is bandied about in light repartee.) Architecture, too, plays a role: the fictional school where the movie is set is modeled on Princeton (my alma mater), which is recognizable in several establishing shots (the view through Blair Arch is particurlarly evocative) and is reproduced in several sets that suggest the imposing Gothic stylings. The hero’s clinic, however, is airy and light and Danish-modern; the director’s faith in the humanizing influence of modern forms is, at the very least, of its time. (I’ve got a capsule review of it in the magazine this week.)

P.S. Here’s what Mankiewicz says, in an interview in the book “Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews,” edited by Brian Dauth, about the turn his life took after he graduated from Columbia—at age nineteen—in 1928:

I was supposed to go to the University of Berlin and then to the Sorbonne, and I had been admitted to Oxford too. When I hit Berlin at nineteen… my God, what a life. Later, when I met Christopher Isherwood at MGM, I told him I could practically sue him for plagiarizing my life.

Further proof, if any were needed, of the blend of avid intelligence and tumultuous experience from which the great works of classical Hollywood were born.

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